Sunday, June 14, 2009

By Jeffrey Schwartz05/05/2009 In a move that promises to extend the appeal of the Spring Framework to enterprise developers, SpringSource on Monday said it has acquired Hyperic Inc., a supplier of open source Web application and infrastructure management.

SpringSource is a key sponsor of the Spring Framework and provider of the most popular Java application framework. Its SpringSource Enterprise includes the Spring application environment and container for building and running Spring-based systems. It also includes an Eclipse-based tooling platform.

By adding Hyperic's application management platform, the company said it can offer both the Spring runtime environment and management fabric.

"With Hyperic, we have the ability to provide visibility into all of the components that could be used in an enterprise deployment such as the Web server, the database pool, the database with a very broad range of resources that we can now monitor and manage the stack," said Peter Cooper-Ellis, SpringSource's vice president of engineering.

While SpringSource had already licensed some of Hyperic's technology, by acquiring the company and ultimately embedding the complete offering, Cooper-Ellis said SpringSource would be able to provide more consistency for both the development and operations side.

"The move increases SpringSource's ability to apply their 'making application development simpler' strategy into the operations management arena," said Burton Group analyst Chris Haddad in an e-mail exchange. "SpringSource's executive management team has been focused on building a 'cloud-ready' application server, and the SpringSource-Hyperic combination will provide required instrumentation and management capabilities."

When organizations look to bring their apps into virtualized or cloud environments, "it gets really interesting because Hyperic has a substantial footprint in the physical world and Web managing and monitoring Web-facing properties in the Java enterprise market," Cooper-Ellis said. "We can use Hyperic to give really good visibility across the entire software stack but also we need to be able to, from the management fabric, interact with the hypervisor layer."

Hyperic's solutions tend to be used in Web operations scenarios where 24x7 uptime is required, and are intended to complement more traditional system management tools such as CA Unicenter, HP OpenView andВ IBM's Tivoli Management Framework, said Paul Melmon, senior vice president of engineering at Hyperic. It provides monitoring, management, performance data, alerting, analytics and auto discovery, he added. Among its customers are hi5 Networks, Salesforce.com and TransUnion.